I dont really understand your point. This topic is not about skill its about the mechanics of the game; i would doubt anyone is seriously saying our DPS is too low. The point is that in the current implementation the legendary meta is very frustrating for fire mages. We have by far the lowest proc chance and the spec is already highly dependent on RNG.

If blizzard is going to make us jump through hoops to get a legendary meta then it better be a clear DPS upgrade over the immediately available burning meta. The fact that we have to argue over its effectiveness is a problem. Please try to comprehend the arguments in the thread before saying everyone is bad.

Hoping this gets fixed soon, this low realppm coefficient for Fire came out of left field and seems like a remnant of when they thought Fire was going to be OP in PTR (and look how that turned out the first week of live). They should just normalize the gem and class balance accordingly around everyone having the gem when 5.3 hits in ~4 weeks. My Mage alt who didn't start the secrets quest immediately should finish his around then. This realppm coefficient mess seems really unnecessary.

So us topping meters every fight in ICC, DS, and T14 prenerf is your meaning of control? Okay.

They can barely contain us now without having to immediately nerf us. We started out shit in ToT, we got gear and we started getting good. Predicting where we'd be, they decide to "nerf" us with a SHIT legendary while everyone else gets a ton more benefit out of it.

If that's YOUR meaning of control, then you have a weird definition.

Regardless, in T16, unless they nerf CM (which would further emphasize that they can't control us correctly), we'll be dominating the meters with our 60%+ crit chance.

It didn't really come out of left field, the information has been available for many many many weeks now.

I've been complaining about it since the initial GC PTR post. I just mean it in the sense that I have no idea why they're not trying to make the gem equal for all specs. In its current state it definitely isn't. It shouldn't be a tuning knob. They can balance entire specs around having the gem equipped in 5.3 or 5.4 if they want, but it's just going to make class balance more difficult if they're buffing or nerfing us via this metagem tuning knob. Already have several other tuning knobs, like CM. Really hard to have much faith in their spec balancing capabilities right now.

On the bright side, coefficients can be hotfixed, so we don't have to worry about a change making the 5.3 patch cycle. Live is the new PTR.

So us topping meters every fight in ICC, DS, and T14 prenerf is your meaning of control? Okay.

They can barely contain us now without having to immediately nerf us. We started out shit in ToT, we got gear and we started getting good. Predicting where we'd be, they decide to "nerf" us with a SHIT legendary while everyone else gets a ton more benefit out of it.

If that's YOUR meaning of control, then you have a weird definition.

Regardless, in T16, unless they nerf CM (which would further emphasize that they can't control us correctly), we'll be dominating the meters with our 60%+ crit chance.

The problem is they cant further nerf CM, because that would break the spec for those without BiS gear, we allready see this being an issue in the current tier, further nerfing it would just make fire unplayable unless you have 540+++ ilvl gear.

They can barely contain us now without having to immediately nerf us. We started out shit in ToT, we got gear and we started getting good. Predicting where we'd be, they decide to "nerf" us with a SHIT legendary while everyone else gets a ton more benefit out of it.

So you're complaining about them doing their job?

And no, that's nothing to do with control. Which is why i suggest you look the word up, it has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

Sure, but all of the problems that we are facing have been known from MoP beta, since then has fireball DPET been too low and pyro damage too high, and blizz didn't react to it at all. Why not, nobody knows.. Every nerf we have gotten has ultimately been down to pyro doing too much damage.. And they won't buff fireball damage, which just leads to fire being extremely high scaling. I mean sure its a "filler" but still it has way too low damage for the current fire to be balanced.

Or, more realistically, because their numbers do not support a change like this.

No. Fire is broken.

In fact, Fire *has been* broken since ICC, when they let us break 80% crit rates and we showed them how broken their hot streak mechanic could get.
As long as Fire has "hot streak" scaling the way it does with crit, it will be a balancing nightmare that CONSTANTLY will require to get hit in the head with a hammer as gear gets better.

Every time there's a new tier of gear, Fire needs to be reigned in, and the lower ilvl mages cringe because it makes the spec even less fun (and dps-wise, worthless) to play. The fact Fire '"requires" a 510+ ilvl to play well is silly, but that's a symptom of how good our scaling is.

That's why we started this expansion with a 1.5 modifier on critical mass, and went as low as 1.2 when HoF/TOES came around. Once you hit sweetspot on crit, shit goes flying out the window.

Unfortunately, it's too late into the expansion to design revamp fire. I'd argue they've been clinging to the crit/hotstreak mechanic for too long (2 expansions now) because it's a signature playstyle of the spec, and they're unwilling to let it go, but, as long as we are so heavily crit dependant, balancing us will be a nightmare.

And this shouldn't be news to anyone. Fire mages are scaling monstrosities that get out of hand really quickly.

At 1.18RPPM, the meta had a ~15% uptime for me most of the time, and it felt like it was up enough to do good damage, and improve a lot of my combustions, as well as bump the proc rate of my other RPPM procs over the course of a night. It's a really powerful gem.

Now, at 1/3 of that, the effects will be compounding, because not only are you giving up the raw benefit of the gem, but you are also losing on lesser proc rates for other rppm mechanics that were benefitting from better proc rates under the meta as well.

Only time will tell if they'll adjust the coefficient up, but, personally I'm not holding my breath. Not every 'legendary' has to be good for everyone, and at this point they probably feel that adjusting the proc up for fire mages would do more harm to the overall balance than good, even if the gem will stand as a mere ~3% upgrade over the meta, while other classes can benefit as high as 15%.

It's poor form to use it as a balancing tool, but... Patience, I guess. As long as the spec doesn't fall behind others, they have no incentive to adjust this, and, since we're still quite competitive without it, we just get stuck with an underwhelming legendary meta.

In fact, Fire *has been* broken since ICC, when they let us break 80% crit rates and we showed them how broken their hot streak mechanic could get.
As long as Fire has "hot streak" scaling the way it does with crit, it will be a balancing nightmare that CONSTANTLY will require to get hit in the head with a hammer as gear gets better.

Every time there's a new tier of gear, Fire needs to be reigned in, and the lower ilvl mages cringe because it makes the spec even less fun (and dps-wise, worthless) to play. The fact Fire '"requires" a 510+ ilvl to play well is silly, but that's a symptom of how good our scaling is.

That's why we started this expansion with a 1.5 modifier on critical mass, and went as low as 1.2 when HoF/TOES came around. Once you hit sweetspot on crit, shit goes flying out the window.

Unfortunately, it's too late into the expansion to design revamp fire. I'd argue they've been clinging to the crit/hotstreak mechanic for too long (2 expansions now) because it's a signature playstyle of the spec, and they're unwilling to let it go, but, as long as we are so heavily crit dependant, balancing us will be a nightmare.

And this shouldn't be news to anyone. Fire mages are scaling monstrosities that get out of hand really quickly.

At 1.18RPPM, the meta had a ~15% uptime for me most of the time, and it felt like it was up enough to do good damage, and improve a lot of my combustions, as well as bump the proc rate of my other RPPM procs over the course of a night. It's a really powerful gem.

Now, at 1/3 of that, the effects will be compounding, because not only are you giving up the raw benefit of the gem, but you are also losing on lesser proc rates for other rppm mechanics that were benefitting from better proc rates under the meta as well.

Only time will tell if they'll adjust the coefficient up, but, personally I'm not holding my breath. Not every 'legendary' has to be good for everyone, and at this point they probably feel that adjusting the proc up for fire mages would do more harm to the overall balance than good, even if the gem will stand as a mere ~3% upgrade over the meta, while other classes can benefit as high as 15%.

It's poor form to use it as a balancing tool, but... Patience, I guess. As long as the spec doesn't fall behind others, they have no incentive to adjust this, and, since we're still quite competitive without it, we just get stuck with an underwhelming legendary meta.

C'est la vie.

^

Huth, I'm sorry you fail to grasp this concept, but Fire has been broken for a LONG time, and every expansion, they fail to fix the core issues. Inferno Blast was made to slightly reduce RNG, and while it's a nice spell, it doesn't fix any of the other broken issues. What's worse is for every ONE thing they fix, they completely cripple two more. Taking MoP as an example:

Fixed in MoP: IB = Less RNG on Hot Streaks. (Mediocre fix as with too much haste, IB can be hard to manage, but it does fix it nonetheless)
^ This was literally the ONLY thing they got right this expansion.

*Broke in MoP*/Still Broken- RNG is still a huge issue, especially with Combustion

- Fire has no cooldowns, except for Combustion, which can swing so wildly

- Fire depends so greatly on gear (Crit, moreso), and scales so dramatically with the smallest boost of free stats
--- Due to Fire's superior scaling, it ends up a very poor choice at the beginning of an expansion, and ends up dominating the charts towards the end
*----- Due to Blizzard trying to alleviate the issue, they made Fire very strong at the beginning of MoP. Too strong in fact that the lowest RNG was middle of the pack, and the highest RNG was a good 30-50% ahead of the next place person. Even worse was that most fights in T14 were close-range, multi-target, cleaving fights, of which Fire is unrivaled in (Fire is the #1 3-4 target, close-range, cleave specc in the game, due to its DoT spreading rolled into its rotation, thanks to IB)

- Fire can go from the worst DPS to the best DPS purely based on RNG
-- Fireball's DPET is too low. Pyroblast's DPET is too high. Having poor luck on Hot Streaks results in piss poor DPS due to having to spam non-crit Fireballs over and over. Other classes get a much more powerful filler because their rotations revolve around it, and their "main spell" isn't procc-based (*see Destro Warlocks on how to design a specc similar to Fire the RIGHT way*) [Something to think about: Frostbolt is faster, snares, AND does higher DPS/DPET, in addition to scaling better (excluding Ignites)]
--- Skill plays a very small role in Fire; when equally geared the best and worst Fire Mages (skill-wise) will do very similar DPS, assuming their RNG is equal
----- The only real "skill" is knowing when to do your Combustions, and when not to, as well as watching trinket proccs

*- Fire has little to no good AoE, as both Blast Wave and no-CD, Instant-cast Flamestrike have been removed completely, leaving on DoT spreading (which is mediocre at best at giant packs), spamming Blizzard (also mediocre), and NTing everything (which is fairly effective)

*- Fire doesn't feel like it has an identity or a special specc-only skill. It was Living Bomb, which, has since, been turned into a (worthless) talent, next to two, greatly superior, other 'bomb' choices

What should they do then? Let fire get out of control at the high end, and let top end guilds just see how many fire mages they can stack because they're balanced around 510, when gear caps out at ~547 after item upgrades? They have to balance for the high end. It's how this game goes. Sorry to say, but reg mode raiding doesn't have much bearing on class balance overall.

Didn't quite come out as I wanted it to. I know they have to balance around heroic gear. It's more the fact that they can't get the scaling under control and have to keep nerfing fire to keep it in check. Look at the CM nerf. Mages in full heroic were hit hard by it, but could still function. Still working on replacing those last few blues? DPS took a nosedive. Just hit 90 and trying to gear up? Don't even think about playing fire. They nerf to keep people in heroic gear from getting out of control and everyone else just gets screwed. /shrug

They had to have known that fire's scaling would get out of hand and how players would react to getting nerfed patch after patch. Just seems shortsighted of them.

Too strong in fact that the lowest RNG was middle of the pack, and the highest RNG was a good 30-50% ahead of the next place person.

Skill plays a very small role in Fire

I agree on most of the other stuff you said, but saying bad rng would put you in the middle of the pack during 5.0 is just clueless(or poor skill/lack of 463 bis week2/lack of raid gear). And apparently shows that skill was present(since it seems you where middle of the pack?..), though mostly in the form of evocation uptime and combustion, as well as other factors like hs+hu when to use it and when not to.

during 5.0 i was NEVER belower 3rd place in the raid no matter the "rng". The fact that people still call rng is stupid. During 5.0 i had almost the same crit as i do now after cm and crit suppress(i got 6% more now) but pyro and combust was not nerfed back then as they are now.

After all the nerfs to combustion, "rng" has become less of a factor in our dps. The very idea that fire is rng is flawed by miles, or a misunderstanding of what real rng is.

If you feel like Rng is the cause to 30-50% more damage then you are clearly doing something fundamentally wrong when playing fire, nuff said. If you base that number og logs etc, ill just add that there is many many ways of padding meters, nothing new.

I agree on most of the other stuff you said, but saying bad rng would put you in the middle of the pack during 5.0 is just clueless(or poor skill/lack of 463 bis week2/lack of raid gear). And apparently shows that skill was present(since it seems you where middle of the pack?..), though mostly in the form of evocation uptime and combustion, as well as other factors like hs+hu when to use it and when not to.

during 5.0 i was NEVER belower 3rd place in the raid no matter the "rng". The fact that people still call rng is stupid. During 5.0 i had almost the same crit as i do now after cm and crit suppress(i got 6% more now) but pyro and combust was not nerfed back then as they are now.

After all the nerfs to combustion, "rng" has become less of a factor in our dps. The very idea that fire is rng is flawed by miles, or a misunderstanding of what real rng is.

If you feel like Rng is the cause to 30-50% more damage then you are clearly doing something fundamentally wrong when playing fire, nuff said. If you base that number og logs etc, ill just add that there is many many ways of padding meters, nothing new.

When I was referring to RNG in 5.0, I meant "if you got absolutely abysmal RNG to the point where Fireball was higher on your spell DPS than Pyroblast", RNG. And yes, if you got THAT kind of RNG, you definitely wouldn't be placing unless your fellow raiders were complete shit, or vastly outgeared you (and back then, my raiders were quite good; hell most of them still are, but that's beside the point )

I said 30-50% was during 5.0. It's no longer the case, but RNG is still a great factor. If you don't see Fire's flaw in being super-heavy RNG, then you're the one who's misinformed.

They had to have known that fire's scaling would get out of hand and how players would react to getting nerfed patch after patch. Just seems shortsighted of them.

They've known for 2 full expansion cycles now.

Fire with more than 55ish % crit = Hell breaks loose.
The problem is, if you aren't critting 45%+, you're pretty useless with it, as well. Fire has no middle ground. (crit rates used overly simplified)

So what happens is, they have to take an arbitraty gear level, and balance the whole spec around THAT snapshot ilvl, and keep steadily nerfing the spec as gear gets better, or else it goes into insane asylum mode again.

Fire with more than 55ish % crit = Hell breaks loose.
The problem is, if you aren't critting 45%+, you're pretty useless with it, as well. Fire has no middle ground. (crit rates used overly simplified)

So what happens is, they have to take an arbitraty gear level, and balance the whole spec around THAT snapshot ilvl, and keep steadily nerfing the spec as gear gets better, or else it goes into insane asylum mode again.

Which is only good for those keeping up with the specc, meaning anyone wanting to try Mage simply cannot even TRY Fire because they'll be so terrible.